Sam Rispaud ’15 writes in with another update from Money and Social Change, a service-learning course taught by Professor Joy Anderson this fall:

Today was an exciting week for the Money & Social Change class. By partnering with the Learning By Giving Foundation our class is given $10,000 to give to four non-profits in Middlesex county. This Saturday, the class met with Professor Joy Anderson for a marathon 5-hour grant-making session. Our goal by the end of the session–albeit an ambitious one–was to unanimously agree on four non-profits to give grants to.

We were forced to make some really hard choices as a class and students had to set aside some of their personal biases for or against certain organizations. The bottom line is that there are so many organizations doing great socialgood. To narrow down our list, we had to decide how we were going to tell a “story” with the organization we selected. Should we focus our money on basic needs and direct services or should we focus on organizations doing systems-level change?

These are examples of some the questions we wrestled with. We are now down to about 10-15 non-profits and will reach our final four in the next two weeks. More to come from the Money & Social Change class next week!